Everyone is getting off to Bonnie Blue

Yes, even you...

We’re living in a porno of astronomical proportions. The women get larger by the minute; the men multiply in squares and cubes. If Fellini were still alive he would go mad. Sandra Milo would be Bonnie Blue; Giulietta Masina would play Lily Phillips. There would be mirrors on the ceiling and queues of masked men curling off into London suburbia. A magician would do card tricks in the crowd. At some intervals we slip into ghostly dream sequences, and at others into the lower recesses of Westminster, where a collection of journalists gossip outside a pub in badly-dubbed Italian.

The journalists are key. We’re the ones getting played. Blue and Phillips have taken our self-serious Take Economy and turned it into a Getting-Off Economy. It only took approximately 1,100 men to get here; now it spirals ad infinitum, like Hieronymus Bosch’s drawings of stairs. You might twist the Getting Off into any form you like, but one thing is certain: everyone, regardless of political affiliation, is doing it. You’re getting off when you tweet in horror about Bonnie Blue’s “dead eyes” and cosmetic filler, and Lily Phillips’ post-coital droop. You’re getting off when you stare at the pictures of the sordid, condom-strewn rooms. You’re getting off when you act horrified about Phillips’ Gypsy Rose Lee-style family business. You’re getting off when you make a noble concession to empathy and imagine what it must be like to go about your day as a 23-year-old porn star.¹ And when you think of the original Lily Phillips documentary and imagine all the adultery and betrayal involved in The Queue then you are most definitely getting off.²

It’s the Lady Writers who are making the most of this. The men are at liberty to watch actual porn and be done with it. The women need to reconcile their own desire to Get Off with the demand for a legible article pitch; they have had to construct a story of their own, a strange synthesis between adult film and morality play. The parable hides at the root of porn. There’s Sade’s Justine on one side and Richardson’s Clarissa on the other; somewhere in between are Grimm’s fairytales, the stories of beauty and consequence. Blue and Phillips are the Ur-Maidens, the heroines of all three at once.³ You can’t imagine them with other women because they have made every effort to erode the distance that would usually bolster successful homoeroticism. They switch quickly from “teen” to “MILF;” they are both corrupting and corrupted. Imagine Sade, locked up in prison, writing a very long story about Bonnie Blue. He would probably just get confused.

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Eva Wiseman wrote an Observer column linking the Gisele Pelicot trial, perhaps ill-advisedly, to Phillips’ YouTube documentary. The final bit raises some questions:

When New York Magazine published a long report accusing writer Neil Gaiman of multiple instances of sexual misconduct, the journalist Marie Le Conte wrote wearily on social media that women shouldn’t have to read it, “but all men should read it to the end, just as all men should have read all the long reads about the Pelicot case, so many seem to still not realise the extent to which so many men hate and want to hurt us”. Yes, these are reports that should be broadcast at half-time at matches, and over the loudspeaker at B&Q, and arrive on men’s phones like the U2 album before them, a confrontation, and another rock thrown.

It is actually quite angering to see women act as if they “have” to read the latest play-by-play tell-all about a woman’s experience with a male predator. (“Wearily” to boot!). As if this were some sort of unspoken feminist duty - the Girl Code. As if the contours of every new Male Predator Tell-All reveal a truth that begs to be universally known by all women; as if we must solemnly keep ourselves up to date with the new tactics men have discovered.

Like a lot of the British literati, Wiseman and Le Conte misunderstand the appeal of these stories. Really: women read the exposés in order to Get Off. The pieces get clicks because they are titillating, and because they create great big openings in the public imagination. Where the predator is famous, the story gains a tremendous amount of symbolic weight; there has always been a mass appeal to the idea of the Rise and the Fall. See: the entire canon of the Gothic Novel, Sunset Blvd, Citizen Kane. (Incursion from the Movie Prop Auction Database: $20m for a SCREEN-WORN predator!!).

Newspapers actively seek out the victims of strange and unusual sex crimes because they know readers will readily soak up the gory details. This is in the DNA of the journalistic profession; the post-2016 rhetoric about “speaking up” and “telling your story” does nothing to cancel out the exploitation inherent to the medium. Schlock is about as central to journalism as morality is to porn.

I would like to hear the journalists who write the stories admit this for once - as well as the podcast editors who superimpose dramatic music onto the teary voices of victims who most likely just want to get their payout and be done with it. Here I ally with the Mail and the New York Post, if only because they acknowledge exactly what it is they’re doing.

The men who aren’t reading these pieces are not escaping their obligations to the opposite sex; they simply prefer to Get Off in a more visual way. You can find many of the impulses of the porn-addicted man in the tell-all addicted woman - the cataloguing of objects and images and Dark Family Backgrounds, the obsession over Real Names, the self-insertion.

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The most enduring True Crime stories all have a Dickensian texture to them.⁴ We complain about all the podcasters, but they are the closest we get today to proper Victorian melodrama. A Netflix documentary has just come out, so all the tabloids are publishing stuff about Amy Lynn Bradley, whose case viscerally terrified me when I first found out about it a few months ago. In 1998 she disappeared from an enormous cruise ship (Titanic; microcosm of polite society) and was never heard from again. The sensible conclusion is that she fell off the edge in the middle of the night. But 26 years of breadcrumbs have led the average human brain into a melodrama of epic proportions. There are the multiple alleged sightings, usually with strange men and sometimes only alleged years later; the extortion attempts; the distinctive tattoo; the grainy photographs of a prostitute in the Caribbean with almost exactly the same face.

This is a plot from Hugo. There is basically nothing in the True Crime Corpus that could not feasibly happen in the deepest throes of Les Misérables, with its prostitution, poverty, child abuse, runaway convicts, and people uncovering dramatic truths through holes in walls. In reality, human traffickers are far more likely to start off as boyfriends. Lots of them trade in real romantic affection. They target women who are already vulnerable, generally because of childhood abuse and substance issues. The slide into prostitution is usually too gradual to be of any melodramatic utility. We know this. But we don’t want to believe it.

It seems inevitable that we keep superimposing sordid, far-fetched morality tales onto the lives of actual women. This is not a moral wrong on our part. It is far more likely that we have an inherent leaning towards melodrama, and we are starved of some ingredient within it; perhaps we need to write and read more sordid, far-fetched morality tales.

There are very few in contemporary literary fiction. The average affluent, educated British Lady Writer - the one Getting Off right now - turns her nose up at “romantasy” and immerses herself instead in what Namwali Serpell cleverly calls the “hit me” novels. The High Priestess of “hit me” is Sally Rooney, whose books contain little of direct melodramatic value: no enormous set pieces, no kidnappings, no extravagant biographical detail. Her imitators adopt the S&M motifs from her books in a dissociated and ambiguous way. The sex is there, but it’s without sensuality. The women are never sure whether they want it or enjoy it. It is Genteel Titillation, without the shrieking or fainting or hours of clean-up. And it’s completely unsatisfying.

Blue is a market opportunist. She has spotted the narrative gap and jumped into it; the Lady Writers cannot get enough. Porn is only a sideline; the real product is The Bonnie Blue Story, the heavenly power supplying the public imagination with its Fantines, Cosettes, Juliettes, Justines, and Marguerite Gautiers. You probably want Bonnie Blue to go away. But she will stick around for as long as the void exists. And you will never, ever stop Getting Off.

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Other things

• Me on the dark, voyeuristic origin of fashion’s “girlhood” wave (New Statesman)

• Me on the massive policy failure of the Online Safety Act, which will actually only enrich the tech monopolies that “do harm” (New Statesman)

• On that note, an update to my link directory, which aims to bring us back to the more fun personally curated internet - I’ve added quite a few blogs and articles (not exhaustive, but will never be!!)

• On Reading the Room, Felice and I talk Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico!

I really want to revive my list of Greatest Korean Pop Videos Of All Time on this newsletter - this one’s now ten years old (!!!) and still a top-three contender. (Also note slight Bruce Conner Breakaway reference before it was cool…)

1. I am convinced this kind of performative empathy is only a tiny bit better than actually inserting yourself into a pornographic film and physically getting off to it.

2. The haunted house was the old emblem of the British literary imagination. But nobody can afford to buy a house now, and everyone’s in a queue or waitlist for something. Could our new Great British Motif be… The Queue? See: the queue to have sex with Lily Phillips, the queue to see the Queen as she laid in state, the anger when Phil and Holly jumped the queue…

3. We know Blue’s life is a morality tale because her new Channel 4 documentary is called 1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story. (Sidenote: I adore this syntactic structure, usually found only in the trashiest American TV biopics. See also: Casualties of Love: The "Long Island Lolita" Story; All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story).

4. And he understood the nature of True Crime himself - see Great Expectations, in which everyone gathers periodically at a public house to hear about the latest sensational murder.